Anne Donovan was the first head coach in Indiana Fever history. She stood on the sideline for the franchise's inaugural game in 2000, the season the team played its first thirty-two professional contests, and she was the figure entrusted with the franchise's very first roster. The team finished 9-23. The Vault keeps her at the top of the coaching ledger because every franchise has a first, and the Fever's first was a Hall of Famer.
She was hired on an interim basis. The general manager and permanent head-coach-in-waiting, Nell Fortner, was finishing her tour with the United States Olympic team in Sydney that summer. Donovan ran the 2000 Fever for the duration of that season and handed the bench to Fortner ahead of 2001. One season, the whole of her Indiana tenure, and that one season was the first one.
Her basketball life dwarfs the Indiana chapter. Six-foot-eight out of Ridgewood, New Jersey, she had been the 1983 Naismith College Player of the Year at Old Dominion, the first woman to win the award. She won Olympic gold as a player in Los Angeles in 1984 and again in Seoul in 1988. She was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 1995, five years before she took the Fever job. By the time she arrived in Indianapolis she was already one of the most accomplished figures in the women's game.
Her coaching peak came after Indiana. She took over the Seattle Storm in 2003 and, with Sue Bird and Lauren Jackson, won the 2004 WNBA championship — the first woman ever to coach a WNBA title team. In 2008 she coached the United States to Olympic gold in Beijing. She later led the New York Liberty and the Connecticut Sun. Her career is a straight line from college dominance to Olympic dominance to championship coaching, and the Fever sit in the middle of it as the first head-coaching job she ever held.
She died on June 13, 2018, in Wilmington, North Carolina, of heart failure. She was fifty-six years old. The Fever released a statement that day mourning their first head coach. The league lost one of its founding figures and women's basketball lost one of the great tall players it has ever produced.
The Vault keeps her here at the front of the franchise, where she stood when the franchise began.